A little niche in the vast expanse of the internet for my writing - mostly poems here, but maybe short stories and essays too.
Sonnets emerge occasionally. Comments welcome.

Monday, 24 April 2017

Book review: "Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction", by Eric H Kline

I enjoyed this, a well-written canter for the layman through an
absolutely vast field. The book is divided in two. First, a summary of the
development of Biblical archaeology over the last two centuries, from resourceful
but not always very expert amateurs seeking to prove the historical truth of
Scripture to the hi-tech and professional multi-disciplinary teams of
twenty-first century archaeology. These MDTs are no longer primarily interested
in establishing the veracity or otherwise of the Bible, but in answering a huge
range of questions about how people in the Holy Land lived, fought, worshipped,
ate, moved and died between approximately 2000 BC and the late first century AD.

Second, Kline
gives us a brief survey of what exactly archaeology tells us about the
reliability of the Biblical accounts, with a particular focus on the Old
Testament, which is more amenable to archaeological proof or disproof as it
covers a much longer span of time and is concerned with kings, conflict,
migrations, settlements, conquests etc., in a way that the New Testament isn’t.
The NT is mostly concerned with ideas and speech, and with a relatively small
number of people who were for the most part socially and politically
unimportant by contemporary standards. There are important NT details that can
be checked archaeologically – the existence of Pilate was confirmed recently
via a contemporary inscription, for example, and a plausible though not
definitive identification has been made of the bones of Caiaphas the High
Priest – but they are relatively few.

The general
impression given is that the OT histories are relatively well supported by the
archaeological data, e.g. the Tel Dan Stele that seems to confirm the existence
of the House of David, though there is (as yet?) almost no evidence that the
Exodus happened in the way that the Bible says, nor does the Israelite
settlement of Canaan seem to have occurred quite as narrated. There is still a
considerable scholarly debate about how and over what kind of timescale the
people now known as the Jews came to inhabit the region in such numbers. That
is not to say that the Biblical accounts of those events are entirely unreliable
or false, merely that they must be read alongside the historical evidence and
with a sensitivity to genre (for example, ancient accounts of battles were not
intended to be read as literal descriptions of what had happened). It would also
appear, as one might expect, that the Bible accounts become less well-evidenced
archaeologically as you get further back into the past, and to semi-legendary
figures like the patriarchs.

The book ends
with an entertaining and cautionary coda looking at some of the controversies
around Holy Land archaeology, inevitable in such a politically and religiously
contested region. One example is the incredible long-running saga of the
Ossuary of James, the supposed last resting place of the supposed brother of
Jesus. Kline warns us to be wary of non-specialists who come to Biblical archaeology
with a clear agenda, as well as the charlatans and conmen only too happy to
fake inscriptions.